LINCOLN CONSPIRATOR’S REMAINS BURIED IN SEMINOLE COUNTY

Orlando Sentinel ^ | August 2, 2021 | Staff

[Red Badger]

Helen Alderman was a young girl when she learned that her great-uncle was the Florida soldier executed on July 7, 1865, with three others who had conspired to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.

On a sunny afternoon 129 years after Lewis Thornton Powell’s death, Alderman, 72, and about two dozen friends, family and historians gathered Saturday under the shade of six cypress trees at a Geneva community cemetery to bury a small mahogany box and close the story of the Florida farm boy who joined John Wilkes Booth in one of the most notorious acts in American history.

“Never in my life did I realize I would one day have to prove my relationship to the Powells,” Alderman said, trying to sum up her role in this odd twist of history.

The Smithsonian Institution, which in 1991 discovered the skull of the Florida rebel among thousands of Native American bones, recently released Powell’s only known remains to Alderman after documenting that she was his closest living relative.

Soon after Lincoln historian Michael Kauffman found Alderman and told her of the Smithsonian’s discovery, Alderman petitioned the museum to allow her to arrange for burial of the skull next to the grave of his mother, Caroline Patience Powell, in northeast Seminole County.

Alderman called Saturday’s funeral service a celebration of reuniting Powell with his family.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks RB.

• Here's Where the Lincoln Co-Conspirators Were Hanged in DC 150 Years Ago [160 Now] [07/03/2025]

[Midwesterner53]

And totally inept, Northerners hates his southern roots, Southerners hated his refusal to support the South.